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Comment by lifthrasiir | Hacker News Reader

A federated version of Wikipedia wouldn't displace the centralized Wikipedia (for the same reason that Wikipedia didn't exactly replace traditional encyclopedias), but it has a potential to supplement everything else, and I believe it's worthwhile enough.

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> for the same reason that Wikipedia didn't exactly replace traditional encyclopedias

It didn't?

Compare https://www.worldbook.com/world-book-encyclopedia-2024.aspx :

> As the only general reference encyclopedia still published today, The World Book Encyclopedia 2024 provides authoritative content on almost every topic to learners of all ages

Most traditional encyclopedias ceased to publish in the book form. Online encyclopedias are pretty much alive.

Their significance in public life was been almost completely replaced by Wikipedia, though

Here in Denmark we have an online lexicon which is managed by (barely paid) scientists and experts. For every article you can see which scientist was involved in making it, what expert is responsible for the area etc. https://denstoredanske.lex.dk/

Wikipedia articles are not consumed like traditional encyclopedias anyway. I would say that encyclopedias became much less relevant in general, but being one of the first influencial online encyclopedias, Wikipedia came to be used as a volatile source of information even though it didn't strive to be one.

We used them for further research or quick look up of facts you should know. That seems to be how people use Wikipedia.

That's how people should use Wikipedia, but people generally don't do so in my understanding.

How do they use it then?

We used to copy articles out of them for homework. The more things change…

As a meager pedestrian, I consume Wikipedia instead of Encyclopedias - that I sometimes did when I was a kid

Idk if it was the first. Microsoft encarta was a pretty big player in that space back in the day.

Was Encarta ever released online? I only remember the CD-ROM version.

Yes, i think starting around 1999 so quite a bit after the cdrom releases. Admittedly that is only 2 years before wikipedia.

But not among the paying clientele.

I suspect they're growing again, much like Usenet, RSS and the blogosphere. Because, you know. I try to check https://www.britannica.com / https://www.encyclopedia.com for political hot topics.

Wikipedia displaced traditional encyclopedias. The number of encyclopedias produced in Finnish fell from ~10 to 1 in the last two decades, that one being fiwiki. The same is true for many languages. What once was a normal thing middle-class families kept in a vitrine is now something old-fashioned and rare. There are no physical copies being printed nor online versions accessible and actively edited. There were online versions, but they were too costly to operate and shut down due to being outcompeted by Wikipedia. There is only fiwiki.

As I've mentioned in other comments, that's not directly related to the rise of Wikipedia because most people no longer read encyclopedias in the way they used to decades ago. I have a counterexample as well; major encyclopedias and dictionaries in Korea are kept alive by portal websites nowadays, but these portals never tried to adopt kowiki instead. (I was one of earlier administrators in kowiki during that transition period, if you wonder.) A better hypothesis for Finnish would therefore be a lack of such sponsors to keep them alive, and that would be completely orthogonal to the existence or absence of fiwiki.

It's not orthogonal, though. We had online encyclopedias for around a decade, they functioned extremely well, and it was the way people got their information. During the latter part of that decade fiwiki started to really pick up steam (although it was years old by that point) and very quickly every other encyclopedia ran out of users and therefore revenue. The concept worked well, it's the movement of users to a competing product that caused their downfall, and therefore it is definitely fiwiki that is the issue.

> but it has a potential to supplement everything else, and I believe it's worthwhile enough.

What do you think it would supplement?

It needs to be on the blotchein! What, too soon?

You know, technically i feel like wikipedia already is. Each revision of a pageis hashed, and they form a sequence in time. Isn't that the definition of block chain?

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